"The fact that they are all bowing down to Modi blows my mind," said entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa, a long-time resident of the Bay Area.Jayadevan PK | ET Bureau | September 28, 2015, 13:32 IST

"Normally, when world leaders come here, they get relegated to the second in command. The fact that they are all bowing down to Modi blows my mind," said entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa, a long-time resident of the Bay Area.

"Let's take a scenario — Facebook drones work, Google Loon works and SpaceX and OneWeb get their micro satellites working," said Wadhwa, fellow, Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University. "Within three to four years, they can start blanketing the earth with WiFi. What happens to Reliance Industries when that happens?"

He warned that telecom companies might be staring at trouble if companies such as Google and Facebook succeed in their ambitious projects to provide Internet access all over the world.

"The telecom companies are going to start screaming — look, protect our monopoly. You sold us all (that) spectrum and now we are going to go bankrupt. You are talking about regulatory battles with all power brokers in the telecom industry, to do whatever they have to do. That's in three-four years from now. And all the tech companies want to make sure that they have created allies," Wadhwa said.

The tech industry has learned from mistakes made by taxi-hailing company Uber and wants to make sure governments don't turn in adversaries when traditional industries are disrupted, he said.

"Uber was a case study in what not to do for the tech industry. At the same time, AirBnB has been working with the governments and this is the lesson people have been learning," he said. "For the tech industry, it's a way of establishing contact and giving their pranaam s. They are touching his feet."

At stake for these companies is a large Internet market that can power their future growth.

"Over the next four years, India is going to be adding half a billion users to the Internet. It's the largest growth market in Internet usage. It is going to make America's dot-com boom look lame," he said.

The Internet user base in India grew to 300 million by the end of 2014, clocking a growth surge of 32 per cent in a year, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India. By 2017, IAMAI estimates that India will have nearly 500 million Internet users.

Wadhwa also criticised the academics who issued a cautionary letter to Silicon Valley ahead of Modi's visit. "You have people who are mired in the past — the archeologists and the anthropologists. But the people who are future thinkers realise that Modi is their best hope," said Wadhwa.

Policies such as the draft encryption policy that came under fire recently are the result of drafting by "low-level bureaucrats" who don't understand technology. "What this told me was that he needs to fire that team and get an intelligent team — maybe five people from Silicon Valley to advise him on tech policy," he said.